BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 285: 3 Reasons Multifamily Rentals Might Be the Perfect Investment with Paul Moore

Episode Date: June 28, 2018

Is there such thing as a “perfect investment?” According to today’s guest, yes. Today on the BiggerPockets Podcast we sit down with Paul Moore, a real estate investor whose 18-year journey thr...ough real estate has included house flipping, new construction, hotels, and finally—multifamily. In this episode, Paul shares three powerful reasons why multifamily might just be the most perfect real estate investment. You’ll learn how Paul discovered the vital difference between investing and speculating, why falling in love (with a deal) is incredibly dangerous, and the huge real estate gamble that Paul made that cost him $40,000. If you plan to eventually buy small multifamily properties, this is one podcast episode you can’t miss! In This Episode We Cover: Paul’s history and how he got into real estate Bought a house for $34,000—painted it, and sold it for $65,000 Never fall in love with a deal From two failed flips to 50 successful ones! The difference between gambling and investing How he built a Hyatt hotel with a partner and lost money Some reason behind the dropping of homeownership Why he thinks multifamily properties are perfect investments How he looked at 180 deals this year He sold an HR company in ’97 for almost $3 million. Ten years later he was 2.5 million in debt. How he was able to end up debt free 13 months later Financing an $8.7 million multifamily property What is a green loan program? The journey to a syndication process How he’s been able to write a book, have a podcast, and write for BiggerPockets Networking through BiggerPockets And SO much more! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Webinars Tim Ferriss Show BiggerPockets New Member Introductions Forums NMAC Conference Books Mentioned in this Show Mastering the Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish The Perfect Investment by Paul Moore The Complete Guide to Buying and Selling Apartment Buildings by Steve Berges The ONE Thing by Jay Papasan and Gary Keller Fire Round Questions What is a good way of finding multifamily owners if it’s owned by an LLC? Where do you gets your numbers when it comes to multifamily units? Tweetable Topics: “Every percent drop in home ownership means a million new people in the renter pool.” (Tweet This!) “When baby boomers rent, they never return to buying again.” (Tweet This!) “Don’t fall in love with a deal.” (Tweet This!) “Wealth built up slowly over time is the key to become successful.” (Tweet This!) Connect with Paul Paul’s Company Website Paul’s Podcast Paul’s Posts on BiggerPockets Paul’s BiggerPockets Profile Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 285. When I went and studied all the demographics and all the underlying reasons that apartments were doing so well, I realized I, in my mind, have found the perfect investment. So I plowed myself at that point into Class B multifamily. And that's what we've been working on for the last four years or so. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio. simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, you're in the right place.
Starting point is 00:00:38 Stay tuned and be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com. Your home for real estate investing online. What's going on, everyone? This is Brandon Turner. Today's host of the Bigger Pockets podcast. I'm done yelling. How you doing, David Green?
Starting point is 00:00:55 How am I doing? How are you doing? Fantastic. I'm the host of the best podcast on all of iTunes. How could I be doing any better? You're the host of the Tim Ferriss show? Wait. Oh, gosh.
Starting point is 00:01:05 No. Tim Ferriss aspires to be what we have here. Tim Ferrars only wishes he could be as cool as David Green and Brandon Turner. No, besides how you doing? What are you doing? What's up with real estate these days for you? Well, I wrote an offer two days ago. And I'm waiting to hear back.
Starting point is 00:01:19 It's on a property in Jacksonville, Florida. The ARVs around 160,000. Looks like it needs between 20 to maybe 30,000 rehab if I go big. and I wrote it around 86,000. So waiting to hear back if the sellers want to counter me, accept or reject. Is that going to be a bur property? It is going to be a burr. Pretty much everything is burr at this point of my life.
Starting point is 00:01:40 Nice. And hey, speaking of burr, if you guys want to know more about burr, I'm going to be talking about it this week on the bigger pockets webinar. You can sign up a bigger pockets. Dot com slash webinar. You like that little plug right there? That's an amazing plug. Yeah. You know, a couple weeks ago we did a webinar.
Starting point is 00:01:52 We had 8,000 people signed up for the webinar. It was insane. Like that's got to be getting close to like world record people attending or signing up for these webinars. So anyway, show up there, fun. Yeah, super cool. I put an offer. Well, sort of we're putting an offer on a 61 unit mobile home park that when I ran the numbers, it's like stupid good. And so I'm trying to figure out like I'm nervous because I'm like, what am I forgetting?
Starting point is 00:02:14 What am I doing wrong? Because it's so good that I feel like something has to be wrong. So I'm going to be asking for some help from some friends of mine on that. So maybe you and I will have to run those numbers together. So you can tell me what I'm doing wrong, which is actually. We talk about that on the show today, about not falling in love with a deal, but falling in love with the numbers, right? And sticking to the math, that's actually a big part of today's show on multifamily properties with our guest, Paul Moore. But before we get to that, let's get to today's quick tip.
Starting point is 00:02:40 Quick tip for today. Very, very, very simple. If you do not have your bigger pockets profile filled out, you are missing out. We talk about this on the show later today about the importance of putting yourself out there to the world and potentially raising money or finding partners or whatever. And if you have a lame looking bigger pockets profile, people aren't going to be as willing to work with you, right? So make sure all your, like, your goals are filled out there, who you are, your experience level. If you're new, say that. That's okay. Get a good looking photo of yourself. If you're a bigger pockets pro member, you can actually upload a video to your bigger pockets
Starting point is 00:03:12 profile, which is an incredible way to build trust and credibility. Like that, whenever I find somebody with a video on their bigger pockets profile, like, I love like learning more about them that way, because a video will tell you 100 times more than text or a picture will. So, anyway, My quick tip today is get into your bigger pockets profile and make it look good and complete because you never know who's going to be looking at it. Unless you're a bigger pockets pro member, you can see who's looking at your bigger pockets profile. I don't know.
Starting point is 00:03:37 Do you know that, David? No. Yeah. Not many people know that. But if you're a pro member, you can actually see who's looking at your bigger pocket's profile so you can reach out to people and have like warm leads. Anyway, that was like five quick tips in one. We got to move on.
Starting point is 00:03:48 Most investors spend more time chasing deals than reviewing their insurance. But a quick coverage check. can be fast, easy, and one of these smartest ways to protect and even improve your property's cash flow. As the months get colder, frozen pipes, icy walkways, and seasonal wear and tear can increase the likelihood of claims. And traditional insurance companies aren't always built to handle these claims quickly or smoothly.
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Starting point is 00:04:36 Steadily, landlord insurance designed for the modern investor. Did you know your house gets bored when you leave? I can't actually prove that, but it probably misses out on the action, the footsteps, the late-night fridge raids. Yeah, when you're gone, your place is basically on unpaid leave. It's sitting there in the dark thinking, I could be contributing right now. Your side room wants a side hustle. Even your Wi-Fi is like, we could be networking. You're on vacation, spending money like it's a sport while your staircase at home is fully
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Starting point is 00:05:40 knowing guests are taken care of and your place is in good hands. You travel, your house works. Everyone wins. If you're ready to host but could use some help, find a co-host at Airbnb.com There are two kinds of real estate investors. Those who have reviewed their insurance and those who think that they have. Most don't realize their coverage wasn't built for how they actually invest. Vacancy periods, rehabs, short-term rentals, or LLC held properties. These gaps surface only when filing claims. That's why investors work with NREG. They specialize exclusively in real estate investors, understanding portfolios, risk at scale, and cash flow protection. One claim can erase years of returns. If you own a rental property, don't assume you're covered. Have NRE review your insurance with someone
Starting point is 00:06:19 who gets investing at NREG.com slash B-P-P-Pod. That's N-R-E-I-G.com slash B-P-Pod. I will put out the call to action one more time. Is that the word? A call of action? Call to action? One more time. Make sure you guys subscribe to today's show.
Starting point is 00:06:34 Make sure you leave us ratings and reviews. Those things help and get more people to hear about the power of real estate investing, financial freedom and rentals, flips, all that good stuff. So subscribe and, you know, help us out. And with that, let's get to today's show. So our guest today is Mr. Paul Moore. Paul has an incredible story. He's been in real estate now for a number of years. He's done everything from flipping to building new to hotels, which is kind of a cool, sad story. I guess you'll hear about that. He's got a very good head on his shoulders about looking for multifamily properties, what to buy, what not to buy. We spend a lot of time on that about value ad. So you guys are going to love today's show. So without further ado, let's get to the interview with Paul Moore. All right, Paul, welcome to the Bigger Pockets podcast. Good to have you here.
Starting point is 00:07:22 It's great to be here. Thanks, Brandon. Yeah. So I'm looking forward to hearing your story, you know, especially I read the notes here that you did something in North Dakota that I think is pretty cool that I want to hear more about. So we'll get to that later. But first, why don't we just start with, you know, you've done a ton of stuff,
Starting point is 00:07:37 but we'll start at the beginning. How did you get into real estate? More like what did you do before real estate than how did you get into it? Okay. Well, I got an engineering degree, which was my first mistake. And then I went on to get an MBA at the first. Ohio State University. And I, after graduation, I went to work at Ford Motor Company. I loved Ford. I loved everything about it. But I was kind of bored. And I started doing side gigs. I was, you know,
Starting point is 00:08:01 trying to start an oil chain shop near Dearborn, Michigan. And then I was doing a property tax consulting gig. And about five years into Ford Motor Company, I ended up getting an opportunity to, with a partner, start an HR consulting, an HR outsourcing firm. And we did that. And we had that company for about five more years. And we sold that company to a publicly traded firm. And, you know, going into semi-retirement in your mid-30s sounds incredible. It was awful. It was miserable.
Starting point is 00:08:35 My wife and I wanted to get away. We were kind of reacting to being near inner city Detroit. So we moved to the top of a mountain in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. We bought 120 acres. We had two kids. We had friends that moved there with us. And it seemed great on paper. But I was a high-energy entrepreneur.
Starting point is 00:08:55 I got bored really quick. We started a nonprofit organization to kind of an outreach to international students studying in the U.S. I love doing that, but it was only occasional. And so a friend and I had never heard of house flipping. I don't know if the term had even been developed. But in 2000, we heard you could get houses real cheap on the courthouse steps. So we made a pact that we weren't going to buy. We were just going to go to the courthouse stuff auction just to observe.
Starting point is 00:09:21 We didn't take any money with us at all. And we got there. It was a snowy, icy day in late December of 2000. We were the only people there. Now, we'd evaluated this house. We'd looked in the windows. It was vacant. And we thought, this house is probably worth about $65,000.
Starting point is 00:09:39 Might only need to be swept and maybe painted on the inside. So we'll go to the auction. So we went. We were the only people that. and it rolled out at $34,000. So we begged the auctioneer to go to lunch. They never do this, right? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:09:54 But we begged her to go to lunch. She did. We came back. We ran across town in the ice and snow, came back with a check for $3,400 as a down payment. We bought the house for $34,000. Three weeks later, we put a for sale by owner sign in the yard, sold it as planned within four hours for $65,000.
Starting point is 00:10:15 I thought, this is easy. We can do this over and over, right? So we thought, well, we'll do a couple of these a month. This will be amazing. And we lost money on two of our three next deals. So it wasn't as easy as I thought. So let's go in that. Why was it just beginner's luck that just the first deal worked out so well?
Starting point is 00:10:36 Or did you do something right on the first deal that you didn't do on the other ones? You know, I think what happened is one of my tenants now is that I, never ever want to fall in love. Now, don't get me wrong. I've been married for over 31 years. I'm all about love. My wife and I love each other, but I do not believe you should fall in love with any real estate property. And I think that's what I did on the second one that we lost money on. I was crazy about Cape Cod style homes. And I still like them now. But I found this beautiful Cape Cod in a declining part of town. And I thought, well, it doesn't matter that the neighbor.
Starting point is 00:11:15 It's the nicest house in the neighborhood. It doesn't matter that the incomes are low and all that. Everybody can see the beauty inherent in this home. Yeah, well, that beauty cost me about $10,000 and eight months of agony. Yeah. So that didn't work out so well. So we went on and decided to do 50 more flip homes and we're much the wiser for these few failures we had along the way. Wait, 50 more flips after 2 that didn't really work out well.
Starting point is 00:11:44 And then you went and ended 50. How did that transpire? So we began to do all kinds of things. We did direct mail. We looked for foreclosure sales in the newspaper and walked up and knocked on, you know, people's doors and asked if they want to sell before the foreclosure. We would go to the courthouse steps. We bought a lot of houses there.
Starting point is 00:12:03 We learned about how to buy houses through HUD. And frankly, we had a really good run. And I don't think we lost money on more. more than one house out of the next 50 or so. And I had this thought, I thought, hey, if we can make this much money flipping houses, we can make a lot more money building houses. And I ignored the small fact that, you know, I didn't know how to hang a doorknob. And so I thought, well, we can be a builder. So we set up a company to do that. And we actually built seven homes. The first six were modular. And they actually went really well. And the seventh one was a stick
Starting point is 00:12:38 built and I don't really want to talk about that if you don't mind. But it went that good. Yeah, it went that well. Yeah. So, yeah, we should have made about $100,000 profit on that. It was a lakefront home at a beautiful lake. And we lost about $40,000 on that deal. So I went from there to actually flipping high end waterfront lots at that same lake,
Starting point is 00:13:02 at Smith Mountain Lake in Virginia. And we did about two or three dozen lots. And it went very, very well. till the recession and then it did not go very well. As you can imagine, we were holding about eight lots at that point. Yeah, lots suffered a lot, especially like vacation style properties. But what does that mean? Can you explain what you mean by like you're flipping vacant lots?
Starting point is 00:13:23 I mean, how did you buy them for one price and then sell them for more without actually doing any work on them? Or did you do work on them? Yeah, so a little bit. So Smith Mountain Lake started about 50 years ago. And some of these folks had had these lots since they were maybe five or 10 or $50,000 back in the 70s or even in the 80s. And they were completely overgrown.
Starting point is 00:13:42 You couldn't see the water in some cases because of all the growth and the, you know, the woods. And these people may have inherited these lots. So we went in and we thought, what could this be at its best? And let's say it was $400,000 because the lots went up like they doubled twice since about nine, I think between 19, 98 and 2005. So we went in. and we just offered him a fair price based on the fact that it was overgrown.
Starting point is 00:14:12 We went in and cleared the lot, left some trees here and there, put a part bench out. We set up a beautiful website just for marketing lots. And we were able to make up to about $100,000 each flipping these lots. Wow. That's incredible. Can you tell me, Paul, you flipped a lot of houses and then you tried the new build strategy. So you got a little bit of, kind of a little bit of variety in how you were doing things. What did you learn during this process of flipping 50 houses that changed the way you approach real estate going forward?
Starting point is 00:14:42 Well, what I should have learned was not to fall in love with a property. And what I should have learned is the difference between speculating and investing. And I have learned those things since. But those experiences that I had have really those and a lot of other experiences doing multifamily and other things in the years since then. have really taught me some lessons, especially in the area of risk versus return, speculating versus investing, and the importance of location. I mean, I know we've all heard that for decades, but it really is important to objectively do that without falling in love with the project in advance. Now, as I say, can you explain what the difference is between speculation and investing in case
Starting point is 00:15:31 those people listening have no idea? So here's how I would define it. I would say that invest. is when your principal is safe and you have a chance to make a return. Gambling or speculating is when your principal is not safe and you have a chance to make a return. And the difference between those two means everything because over the years, I did all kinds of things that I didn't mention here where I was actually speculating and I considered it investing. And that mistake cost me a lot. I mean, hundreds of thousands of dollars like the time. I mean, I have a petroleum engineering degree.
Starting point is 00:16:07 So I thought, hey, this oil well opportunity in North Dakota is amazing. And so we invested, and a lot of friends invested with me in that. And we lost all of our money because, again, the principle wasn't safe. Sure, we could have made 10x when they hit oil, but they didn't. And there's all kinds of things like that in my life that I can point to where I didn't know the difference and it costs me a lot. It reminds me a bit of the oil thing you mentioned. It reminds me a bit of like how people view cryptocurrency, how I view cryptocurrency, right?
Starting point is 00:16:36 It could very much take off and be worth 100 times, a thousand times more than it is today, right? There's also a much greater chance of a dropping to nothing. So, but I'm not saying a person shouldn't have part of their portfolio on it necessarily. I don't, but how do you view that? Like, where should some, where should speculation, where or when should it play a role in an investor's life? So Paul Samuelson, the first U.S. Nobel Prize winner in economics said investing should be a lot like watching grass grow or watching paint dry. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas. Now, I think it's fine to speculate as long as you're aware that's what you're doing.
Starting point is 00:17:18 It's fine to gamble as long as you're aware that that's what you're doing. And people make a lot of money. A lot of the famous investors in the world started out that way. And I think it's fine. But I wouldn't actually want to be in a position where I was putting money I needed to live on or any more than perhaps 10 or 15% of what I have into an investment or a speculation like that. Yeah. You make a really, really good point because I agree with you 100%. It's okay to do things that are somewhat gambling as long as you're aware that that's what you're doing.
Starting point is 00:17:49 You haven't tricked yourself into thinking, oh, I'm investing money in this thing because I think it's going to take off and run. You know, and in 2005, 2006, that's what a lot of investors with air quotes were doing is they were buying properties. They had no idea how the fundamentals of real estate worked. they were hoping that the market would continue to appreciate and they would sell later. And we thought all these people were smart that were making money because they were getting lucky. And when the music stopped, there was no chairs left to sit in.
Starting point is 00:18:14 And they lost a lot of money. And I really like your definition of that. It's investing is is making an investment that you're not likely to lose capital in while expecting a return. Whereas gambling, like when you go to Vegas and you go play roulette, you could get a return on your money. But your investment is not safe. So it sounds like that kind of set the foundation for, what you went on to do in your investing career. Can you tell us a little bit about what the next step was in your evolution? So we were actually going to North Dakota. My business partner is from
Starting point is 00:18:44 Colorado and he would fly up. He has a small jet and he would fly up to North Dakota to check out these oil and gas investments we were considering. And he could never find a place to stay. And so I went with him. And there were trucks generally pick up trucks and some cars parted all along the road, all along, you know, rest stops, et cetera, around Williston and Watford City, North Dakota, because these guys had no place to sleep. There was no housing. You know, tens of thousands of oil workers descended on a town like Watford City that had a population of 3,500. And so they, we realized, hey, he had to fly his plane back out to Bismarck or to another or back home to Colorado when he went to look at these oil and gas things. So we said, hey, we're both involved in real
Starting point is 00:19:32 estate. Let's open up a, you know, hotel or an apartment, furnished apartments for these workers. And we were able to do that very quickly. We bought 75 acres of farmland on a main road. And we opened this quasi hotel, quasi multifamily. And, you know, rents in middle America generally, or let's say about a dollar a square foot per month. Well, we were charging $13 per square foot per month and we were staying almost full. Wow. It was amazing. So we were charging about $4,000 a month for a 300 square foot, beautifully furnished little,
Starting point is 00:20:10 you know, modular cabin. And they would put two guys in there. The oil company would pay the bill. And we stayed full and we did that for a number of years. And, you know, my partner and I operated that and we sold that in 2013. team. So that's where I would, you know, when I heard that you did that, because back, back when North Dakota was going nuts, I thought of that exact same thing.
Starting point is 00:20:30 I was like, I totally want to go there and build something. But my fear was, you know, what if one day the oil just stops or the government changes some regulation, they stopped drilling, whatever, I'm going to be left with this property. That actually makes no sense whatsoever because it's in the middle of nowhere. Was that a fear for you? Or how did you, you know, how did you view that? Then how did you get out of it? How did, is it still doing well?
Starting point is 00:20:49 I think it was. Yeah. So I think it was just dawning. on me, you know, the difference when we were in the middle of that, of the difference between investing and speculating, because that was around the time we lost the money in the oil and gas. Oh, and did I mention we set up a wireless internet company to serve the Northwest North Dakota, and we lost money in that. And so I think I started to see the difference in investing versus speculating about that time. And I realized, oh, my goodness, we are in a very, very difficult,
Starting point is 00:21:16 a very vulnerable position. We're making all this money. But, you know, if oil prices dropped, and of course they won't, they said. But if oil prices drop a lot, we have an albatross on our hand. So we sold it in the height of the boom. Oil was still probably about $90 a barrel. And of course, we had no way of knowing that a year later it would be down to the mid-30s per bail. The buyer was a very large company, and they rode it out, and they're doing fine now. They're actually one of the few companies in that area that withstood the storm. Our theory there was to build the nicest place in town and that if others, you know, these man camps, if they folded and left town, we would still be there.
Starting point is 00:21:57 And that's how it's worked out for the buyers. But it was speculative. I just want to be clear. Yeah. Yeah, I actually love that philosophy too of like if you build the nicest one in town, like it is kind of a hedge against bad things happening. You know, I bought a property and it wasn't in a great location. It's not in a growing town.
Starting point is 00:22:15 It's a fourplex. But I was like, I'm going to make this the nicest fourplex in that entire area because every other property will fall first and every other one will have, you know, but at the end of the day, like if people are going to live somewhere, they're going to live in mine because I have the best looking one or the best, best management, best look. So I like that a lot. Exactly.
Starting point is 00:22:33 And our thought with that is even if the, you know, all the people drilling wells and providing water and providing sand and all the chemicals and all this stuff, even if they left, there'd still be production people. left behind. And that's exactly what happened. And those production people are still staying in those units now. Okay. So you were able to exit that successfully. What came next? Well, we decided it would be a good idea to go to a neighboring larger town, a town of about 75,000, my not North Dakota, and build a Hyatt hotel. And so we built the nicest Hyatt House hotel that we know of in the U.S. And I think Hyatt told us that it was.
Starting point is 00:23:12 And about the time it opened, oil prices dropped. We were also counting on the fact that a new Walmart and a hospital and all this was going to open right across the street. And so we bought the land for a great price before all that happened. And taking that risk really shot us in the foot. So thankfully, I was not a financial investor in that. And I wasn't one of the folks on the loan. and my partner did all that. But yeah, it did not end well.
Starting point is 00:23:43 What did you learn from that experience? Like you realize, oh, that didn't go well. But you're someone who just continually pushes forward. You're always moving forward. I really respect that. Tell us what you learn from this that our listeners can hear and say, okay, I want to make sure I don't make that mistake. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:23:58 So I backed up to what we had done before, which as I mentioned, was a quasi-multifamily. And I realized, hey, I mean, I really realized, I think the importance of, market selection. I realized, and I didn't want to be a developer. I realized I did like multifamily, but I didn't want to develop it from the ground up and, you know, get caught in the wrong end of the cycle there. And about that time, I turned 50 years old. Now, I know you guys are thinking that this guy doesn't look a bit over 40, right? Exactly what I was thinking. Exactly. But about the
Starting point is 00:24:32 time I turned 50, I thought, hey, what is, what is something that I can leave my kids? You know, I don't want to be on the bad end of a cycle. You know, we made millions of dollars and then we lost millions of dollars. And I don't want to be on the lost part. You know, for some reason I can't work again in the future. And I want to leave my kids a legacy. I want to leave them something. I want something with demographic trends that support, you know, that I can look out
Starting point is 00:25:00 decades in advance and see where it's going. And I was looking for the perfect investment. And that's really, really a tall order. But when I went and studied all the demographics and all the underlying reasons that apartments were doing so well, I realized I, in my mind, had found the perfect investment. So I plowed myself at that point into class B multifamily. And that's what we've been working on for the last four years or so. And that's exactly what I want to ask you. What is it about multifamily investing that actually makes it the perfect investment? Well, you know, about 1995, the government began tampering with homeownership. And you, as we all know, they loosened up the loan restrictions and lots of people, as you can imagine, bought houses that probably shouldn't have. And so homeownership skyrocketed from the low to mid-60s up to 69.3% by the year 2005. And as we all know, the house of cards came tumbling down. And with that, homeownership, dropped to about 63% in the next 10 years up through about 2015.
Starting point is 00:26:14 Now, every 1% drop represented a million new people in the renter pool. So this decline in homeownership and this increased desire to rent made apartments have a great swell. Now, during that same time, during the crash, there wasn't a lot of new, there were not a lot of new apartments being built. So the supply and demand got way out of whack. And for apartment owners, that was a great benefit because they did very, very well during, you know, after a little dip, they did very well during the recession. And they continue to do well now. I believe there were 90% lower foreclosure rates with Freddie Mac in multifamily than there were in single family. I think that the, even though in some private banks and CNBS loans, there were up to 90%.
Starting point is 00:27:06 or 10% foreclosure rate. Freddie Mac did very well. They were in the four to four and a half percent foreclosure rate for homes, but multifamily, including Nevada, California, Arizona, Florida, had a lot of foreclosures and including some mom and pop operators. They were only at 0.4%. So 4% plus are single family, 0.4 for multifamily. Now the rates have dropped, and single family is, excuse me, multi-family is about 98% lower foreclosure rate today in 2018 than single family. Wow. Now, I think there's three underlying demographics that are underlying a lot of this. Number one, the smallest but fastest growing group of people who are renting now are the baby boomers.
Starting point is 00:27:57 And of course, that's people who are generally in their mid-50s up to their mid-70s. And that area is growing. And statistics say that when they rents, they'll never return to buying again. Number two, of course, we got millennials. They don't see the value in tying themselves down to a 30-year contract on a seemingly overpriced piece of real estate. Millennials want more flexibility, you know, a chance to move across town, across the country, new friends, new job next year. And frankly, a lot of them have a lot of student debt. And so they're not able to purchase a home. And the third group is immigrants.
Starting point is 00:28:36 immigrants are playing an increasing role in home, the home buying versus renting economics. And typically, immigrants tend to rent more than buy. So for those three reasons, I think we can look out decades and see that the multifamily business will be very strong. Yeah, I like that a lot. And I agree 100% with all of it, which is why I buy multifamily and why David Green is working on it. David, you're going to get your multifamily by the end of the year? I think it's more than likely, yeah. That's the same thing I'm seeing.
Starting point is 00:29:08 I mean, not only for the same reasons you're saying, Paul, I think more because I just am so busy that I can't keep up with, continuing to buy single family homes. It's a lot of work. And part of the benefit is they're more flexible. It's easier to sell off a single family house. And, you know, you have 10 single family houses. You can parcel off four of them.
Starting point is 00:29:25 But the downside of that is it's way more work managing it and acquiring it. And, I mean, but Brandon's always telling me that the 24 Unity Bot is just as much work as a, you know, regular house that you could buy. I'd actually say it's less. My apartments are generally, like my apartment and mobile home park, like, they're less work than what I typically do on a single, like that $15,000 house I bought at the courthouse steps was far more work than the last department complex I bought or the last mobile home park because the larger deals have the work built into them, like where they
Starting point is 00:29:57 have systems and stuff already in place because, you know, because the previous owner had run it that way too. So yeah, definitely. Yeah, I agree. All right. So you decided multifamily was where you're going to head. So what did you do? What did you buy?
Starting point is 00:30:10 Well, the first thing I did is I decided, hey, here I am in my 50s. I have a brand new business to learn. And I decided that the best thing for me to do would be to get a mentor. So I looked at a few of the mentors out there. And actually, I got a business partner. This is a guy who's a doctor and he's real smart. And he has said no to a lot of the spec. speculative investments I've thrown in front of them for years. And when I told him about multifamily,
Starting point is 00:30:37 he was in. So we jumped in and we actually hired a very expensive mentor. We spent a year in their mentoring program and it was awesome. And then we spent the next year and a half after that. We both had other income sources at the time. And we were both busy with these other things. So we piddled around, you know, doing a website, then redoing a website. And we each ended up doing, setting up some marketing systems. We started figuring out how to get investors, how to try to do acquisitions of these larger multifamilies. And then we brought on a partner and redid the website again. And each one of us wrote a book about multifamily investing because we had researched the heck out of it. So, and we finally got around to buying a multifamily. Now, the problem is by that time, I mean, who
Starting point is 00:31:23 knows where we are in the cycle? It seems like we're at the peak, but they thought that in 2013 and 14 and 15. I don't know where we are, but I can tell you this, that the demand, and I think everybody knows this, the demand for multifamily is so voracious now. It's very hard to find a good deal. Yeah. And so that's where we've been. Brandon and I preach very consistently that in this market, you are not going to find a good deal. You need to make a good deal. You need to understand the fundamentals of what makes an investment profitable.
Starting point is 00:31:54 And you need to recognize when there's like an inefficiency in the way it's being run or something about. that is being overlooked by other investors. So tell us a little bit about in your study of this and in the book you wrote, what are some things that you look for to add value to a property to make a good deal where somebody else might have missed it? Well, the obvious things, of course, are doing interior renovations. And a lot of apartments were built in the 80s in particular. And some of them out there are still not renovated.
Starting point is 00:32:21 So that's the obvious place to do value add and increase, do the renovations, increase it, the rent, increase the net operating income. But the less obvious areas are where we need to be looking now. And you talked on a couple podcasts ago about hidden value add opportunities. And we found one on our recent purchase of an apartment complex in Lexington in Kentucky. We looked at the numbers when it was still not even on the market yet. And the broker was showing us some of the numbers. We said, these utility costs seem wrong. And so we went to a utility consultant, and he confirmed that the water and sewer alone were about 110% higher than they should have been. So over double, right? And so went ahead and got estimates, figured out what it
Starting point is 00:33:09 would cost to put in, you know, water meters. All the water was being paid by the, you know, by the owners. And we thought, well, if we, even if we don't pass or until we pass the water costs off to the tenants, we can still dramatically reduce this because this was a 1960s apartment. We figured there were leaks. We found out one of the leaks. We actually went there and we noticed every day that the pool seemed to drop about six inches and level. And this was in the fall. But we said, what's going on at the pool? And the maintenance guy goes, yeah, I don't know. We just fill it up every day. And so we thought, ah, that's a good sign. So we bought that apartment. And I think it was before anybody else realized there was a utility issue. Now, the great news is by installing these
Starting point is 00:33:50 water meters, we're able to get for about $70,000 installation costs, we're able to get. We're able to get theoretically and we're just fairly we're just fairly new into this we expect by the end of the year to save $65,000 so that's over a 90% ROI each and every year and it's something that you know generally value add people wouldn't have caught that and so we caught it and we're we feel very fortunate that we did that's cool I like I like that I think sorry go ahead I could tell you're I take it that you're going take it yeah take it I like I like that when you're buying a family property, it feels much more like buying a business than when you're buying a single family property. And if you retrain your brain to look at it from that perspective, this is my business,
Starting point is 00:34:34 this is my income, these are my expenses. How do I lower my expenses and raise my income as much as I can? You can have a much more direct impact on the bottom line than with a single family house. It's just very hard to generate more income from a single family house. It's very hard to decrease expenses on a single family house. You don't have the variety of expenses and opportunities to save, right? Like, I'm not paying for landscaping and water on my single family house. I'm paying tax, insurance, a mortgage and repairs and vacancy. And that's it. There's very little I can do to lower those. And conversely, I can't really do much to increase my rent either. You know, like, it's going to go up every year when the lease ends if it goes up and it will only go up with the market will bear. Well,
Starting point is 00:35:13 with multifamily property, you can, you know, rehab the properties and you can charge more for rent. You can see that like, well, this area is booming and there's not enough housing. So rent's going to go up a lot. You can do things like look and see the pool wasn't being run well. I mean, who would have thought to look to see is the pool being maintained efficiently and save yourself a lot of money? There's just so many more opportunities to run it like a business and with single family. And you're living proof of somebody who you went by your first property and you crushed it on your first one.
Starting point is 00:35:39 You know, how many of us can say that about many things in life that the first time we did it, we did really well. Yeah, that's true. And you've talked about this on the show before. But, you know, the opportunity to force appreciation, you know, through values. ads in a commercial level multifamily, you know, anything five units and up is phenomenal because as we've talked about before, they're not based, the value is not based on comps or comparable properties. The value is based on the income, you know, divided by the cap rate.
Starting point is 00:36:09 And so the income, I mean, if we're able to increase the income, 65,000 of this property, and the cap rate is, let's say, 6% more or less, you divide 65,000. by 0.06, 6%, and we just increased the value on off the top of my head thinking about a million dollars by making that $70,000 change. That's pretty big. And that's really good for us, really good for our investors. And it's obviously great for the environment as well because we're wasting less water. So how do you, you know, when you install submetering and you allow the tenant to go in and start paying their own water, like how do you get them to do that without just leaving, right? Like, or are there other ones in the area that have it that way? Or how does
Starting point is 00:36:52 How did that transition go? Yeah. So first of all, there's others in the area. They all generally, the tenants pay the water. We actually have not passed it back to the tenants yet because there's a flat fee for water, sewer, trash, termites. And that's being passed back already. So effectively, okay, effectively the, because it's a flat fee, the company is paying it.
Starting point is 00:37:18 If the water is double this month, well, that's on the company. If it's half, the company saves it. But when we do pass it back, I don't think it'll be that hard because I don't, by reducing the flat fee and increasing their personal responsibility, I think it's going to be about a wash in the end. Okay. Cool. So what did you pay for the property?
Starting point is 00:37:36 We paid $8.8.85 million for the property. Oh, wow. And how did you finance that? It was through a Freddie Mac and we actually got a green loan. And same thing. The submetering actually gave us a qualification to get a Freddie Mac green. green loans. So we saved 20 basis points or 0.2% on the interest rate, which saves us about $12,000 a year on the loan as well. That is cool. I'd not heard of green loans. Is that like that's a
Starting point is 00:38:03 Freddie Mac product then? Yeah, Freddie and Fannie both have a green loan program. And it's basically if you can document that you can, you know, change showerheads or add submetering or whatever you can do to document that you're going to help the environment. They'll let you qualify for a green loan. Yeah, that's super cool. I did not know that. All right. So you did that. Did you put just normal 20, 30% down payment? Did you raise any money? How did that work? Yeah, we syndicated this deal. We were able to get a 72% loan to value loan on this. Then we were, we raised the rest of money. We raised about $3.8 million in total for this. Wow. And that included the equity we needed to raise to buy the property. And as well, that included another million dollars or so for some changes, reserve. other things that we need, you know, fees, loan fees, closing costs, etc. So super cool. It's about what it was.
Starting point is 00:38:57 Where did you, where did you raise that money from? I mean, like, is this family friends? Do you? Because a lot of people want us to do real estate, like larger deals. And they don't know how to start the syndication process. Obviously, you have some experience, but can you kind of walk us through that journey? So in 2008, I didn't mention this, but when the real estate market was tanking and we were, I don't know if I mentioned, but we were, we had two million dollars.
Starting point is 00:39:20 in the bank in 1998. A decade later, we had two and a half million dollars in debt. Oh, wow. And that was all tied to real estate, thankfully. But 13 months later, through some prayer and some, a lot of hard work, we were actually completely debt-free. And it was amazing. And that was in 2009. But during that time, it was kind of a dark time for me. And I actually went and learned copywriting. I learned marketing copywriting. And I spent a couple of years doing that. I actually made quite a bit of money doing copywriting, believe it or not. And I was still doing real estate as well on the side. But I learned to write well.
Starting point is 00:40:00 And I also learned a lot more about just, you know, how to work with people. And it was basically, you know, it's sales writing, if you will. And so I learned a lot about sales. And then here I am years later, scratching my head about three years ago, wondering, how are we ever going to get investors? We have a limited number of friends and family. We have a limited, you know, reach. I mean, both my partner and I are in fairly small towns in central Virginia.
Starting point is 00:40:27 And I heard this concept, and there's a book called By Vern Harnish called Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, I believe. And in that book, he talks about the difference. He talks about, he says, if you're up north in northern Canada or wherever, and you need to survive, You can choose to become a spear fisherman, and you can learn to throw a spear really well. Hoping it's sharp enough, hoping the fish swims by it just the right time, hoping that when you throw it, the fish doesn't turn or the spear doesn't angle off in the water. And you'll catch some fish, but it's real hard and it's real uncertain. He said, or you can be like a grizzly bear.
Starting point is 00:41:09 He said, you can be the grizzly bear standing in a waterfall with your mouth wide open, letting fish jump into your mouth. And I thought, oh my goodness, I heard this on a podcast and I rewound it several times. And I realized, that's it. I want to be the grizzly bear and the waterfall. And so what that meant was being so compelling and having such a platform that people come to you and they want to invest with you. And so that's what we've done. That's why I decided to write a book. That's why we redid the website. That's why I started blogging on bigger pockets. That's why I set up a podcast.
Starting point is 00:41:52 We have a podcast called How to Lose Money. Trust me, it's a wealth-building podcast, but we set up all that. And what I found was a year later, we had literally a couple hundred people asking if they could invest with us. And so that was the key to us finding the investors. and we actually sold out on that investment in about 10 days. And we had quite a few people, including a good friend of mine who had 200,000 to invest, who didn't even get in on time. And so that was very fortunate.
Starting point is 00:42:23 And that's how we raise the money. That's a cool story. I like that a lot. And you know, like, if people want to raise money, you want to, I mean, let's just even go a step back from raising money. If you want to work with people, right, you want to bring in a partner. You want somebody to lend you money. Like, you're not going to do it sitting in your.
Starting point is 00:42:40 couch watching dancing with the stars every night, right? Like you got to go out there. You got to meet people. You got to connect. You did blogging. You did podcasting. A lot of people wonder why they should engage on the bigger pockets forums. Like that's like that's a really good reason why is because where else you're going to go that there's thousands or hundreds of thousands of real estate investors just gathering, talking and hanging out. Like it's just it's not because we just want to go to the forums because we like talking with real estate. We do. But there's another agenda behind everything that do as well. And it's not a bad thing. It's a good thing. So I love that your story did that. You just went out there and you provide good value, good content. I know you're all over the
Starting point is 00:43:19 site. I see your name all the time because, you know, you understand that there's value in giving back to people and in providing value. So nice work. Thank you. I really appreciate that. And I will put a plug in for bigger pockets there. I know a guy who actually doesn't write for bigger pockets, but he goes in and I think daily goes in every form of magic. answers questions, engages people, gives long, meaty answers, throws his phone number in. And he's engaged with hundreds and hundreds of people. And he's actually raising capital on his own. He doesn't even have his own deals.
Starting point is 00:43:53 He's raising capital for other people's deals. He's done a phenomenal job. And it's all been through bigger pockets forms. Yeah. That's super cool. Yeah. There's a lot of money that is spread around, like naturally in bigger pockets. And we don't, you know, like people make them.
Starting point is 00:44:10 steak, right? They go to the forums or they go to the marketplace. I'm looking for money. Who's got money? Like, give it to me, right? And then, of course, everyone lasts at them and somebody will write something rude and the person who got mad and leave the site and never come back. But it's a giant room where you go and talk with other investors and you build your reputation. You build your conversation. So, you know, I guess everyone listening to this. Get involved. Start talking. It doesn't cost anything. It doesn't take a pro membership to even to post in the forums. It's totally free. Go post in the forums. Ask questions. You know, even if it's simple, I guess simple as simple as welcoming.
Starting point is 00:44:40 new members. Like we have a new member forum. There's hundreds of people in there every week that are joining the site and saying, well, hundreds of day they're doing site, but that are saying like, hey, I'm brand new here. Hey, welcome to the site. Glad, glad to have you here. Let me know if I can help you. Like little things like that. It makes such a difference. Absolutely. Yeah, super cool. All right. So where do, where do you see your future headed like after this in terms of real estate? You wanted to keep syndicated multifamily. How big do you want to get? Where do you see yourself? So we want to syndicate multifamily and that's our desire. And like you said, you make. your own deals. But we, all of us in our mid-50s and we all the partners with Wellings Capital
Starting point is 00:45:17 and my company have decided that we're not going to do deals that don't make sense. Duh. And but we have realized that a lot of syndicators or at least some syndicators out there, either for whatever reason are overpaying for properties. And I think one reason is, one reason I think is there is international money coming into the space. And I heard this quote from a guy who's raised literally over $100 million internationally. He said, my international investors, if they can get from their currency, which in this case was China, if they can get from their currency into the U.S. dollar and break even on the investment, they'll be okay because they've protected themselves against the drop in the Chinese currency. Guys, think about that. Yeah, we're
Starting point is 00:46:04 competing against them. We're competing against them. And so, I mean, I'm not saying that's on every deal, but there are people out there bringing money like that. And there's no way to compete. And so some of those folks, there's other people with 1031 exchange, you know, tax deferred money. There's people with IRA money. And frankly, there's probably a few syndicators out there, none on bigger pockets, of course, but a few who might do a deal just to make the fees. And it might not be a great deal or maybe a deal where they're counting on appreciation.
Starting point is 00:46:34 And we all saw how bad that ended for people back in, let's say, Florida or California. in the last recession. And so it's critical to have sound economics. It's critical to rely on cash flow, not just appreciation. And so we're having a trouble, we're having trouble finding deals right now. And so I think, you know, my book's called The Perfect Investment. And I think when the perfect investment is not perfect is when you can't find deals in good markets that make sense. And so that's kind of where I and a whole lot of other sense, syndicators that I know in multifamily are, that's the problem we're facing right now. Yeah. So do you think just hold off or are you still running numbers on deals? You're still
Starting point is 00:47:17 looking, trying to find something. So in January this year, there was the NMHC conference in Orlando, Florida. And that was around January 20th. We've run numbers on or at least looked at the demographics, crime scores, et cetera, on 180 deals since then. And that's been in about five months. And we've only found a handful that it made sense to make offers on, and we've been beat out on those by people who, in my opinion, or at least with my numbers, it looks like they're overpaying. So, yeah, we're going to continue. And we are actually, you know, I mean, I'm not looking forward to anybody ever hurting or anybody losing their property, but there's going to come a day when it probably won't be as severe as last time because the loan to value rates, you know, ratios have not
Starting point is 00:48:03 been as high as they were pre-2006, but there's going to come a day when some of these folks, you know, get in trouble and they have to refinance the interest rates are higher or the, you know, the rents haven't gone up. And so there'll be a time when multifamily investors will have an opportunity to scoop up some of these deals. And so we think that time is coming. We don't know when. Until then, I've actually been pondering for about five months, the possibility, and we actually are, in fact, dipping our toe in the water into investing with an operator in a different asset class. And we're doing that now. Oh, cool.
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Starting point is 00:52:46 So, Paul, number one, what is a good way to find the owner of a multifamily property when it's owned in a corporation? I can't just look up there. Basically, you can't just look up their information on the county assessors because it's owned by some nameless corporation. How do you get in touch with that multifamily owner if you wanted to reach out? So we haven't done this yet, but my son is actually buying, my son's 24. I'm really proud of him. He actually introduced me to bigger pockets years ago. And he's actually buying and flipping farmland and, you know, large mountain properties, you know, 100, 200 acre timber properties. And from what I understand, you can use skip tracing to actually track down the owner, the actual owner, sometimes give their cell number, sometimes get their email address as well. there you go. All right. All right. Where do you get your numbers when it comes to multifamily units?
Starting point is 00:53:39 I'm having a tough go when it comes to finding information on rents and the other numbers as it applies to multifamily. So if they're talking about a specific property, you know, the current owner and usually through the broker should be able to provide those numbers. You should be able to get a T12, you know, create your own T3. You should be able to get a rent roll. All that should be forthcoming. And if they say to you, just go ahead and write out. letter of intent, go ahead and write an LOI, we'll give you those numbers later. Well, you can do that, but what good, what worth, what value is that LOI to anybody if you have no numbers to base it on?
Starting point is 00:54:15 I will say we have fired off a few of those just to try to get interest over the years and it just hasn't gone anywhere. Sure. I agree. All right. Number three question. How do you find a good broker to work with when looking for large multifamily properties? So this is actually one of the barriers to entry for getting into multifamily. And that is, do you remember the, you guys were probably too young to remember this, but there was a 1980s TV commercial where this scrawny guy comes in, he's applying for a job and the guy stamps, you know, rejected on his resume. And he says, you need experience. Experience is required. And the guy turns around the camera and says, but where do I get the experience? Well, that's actually, that's actually very,
Starting point is 00:55:02 relevant to large-scale multifamily. Brokers, owners, sellers, they're going to be looking for experience. And so it's a real quandary to know how to get that experience. And so I'm actually working on a book right now because I get this question every week. How do I get enough experience to get in front of a broker and get their attention? Which I think is the more relevant question here. If you do not have the experience and you do get the attention of a broker, a really good broker with a really good property for sale and they're telling you this, hey, I'm going to give you a heads up on this before it hits the market. Chances are they're looking for a sucker. They're looking for someone who's willing to overpay. Be careful. Yeah, really good advice. That's really good.
Starting point is 00:55:48 All right. What are the top deal killers in a multifamily purpose? What should I look for during due diligence? Well, there's a lot of things. We had a property under contract in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and we actually found mold, and we couldn't find this in the pre-walk-through, but during due diligence, we found mold in about, I think it was six of the 16 buildings in the basement. And we talked to tenants who said, hey, this is not only in the basement. I think it's in my bathroom. I think it's coming up through the walls, et cetera. So that was one for us.
Starting point is 00:56:22 Other deal killers, you know, asbestos, you might say, hey, I'm going to take out this wall to open it up here. You need to know or at least try to find out all the information you can. can on whether you can really open up that wall, whether you can really make those changes you want to. Other deal killers are you find out that some of the income is one-time income and you've kind of, you know, this is part of that thing about not falling in love. If you fall in love with the deal, you're going to look for all the reasons to do it before due diligence. But if you're staying objective, or at least you're aware of the possibility that you could fall in love, you're going to try to stay objective and you're going to look for reasons to say no rather than to say yes.
Starting point is 00:57:06 And so then you'll find things that jump out at you like, you know, income that will be one-time income that you counted as an ongoing income or things like that. So those are some of the deal killers, I think, that are really important. And learning to not fall in love is the key to due diligence. Yeah, that's such good advice. I mean, like, I know I'm tempted all the time to fall in love with deals. And I just have to remember, like, two things you said there. First of all, like, you look for reasons to, like, it's a good idea to look for reasons to back out. Like, hey, like, let me find a few reasons why I shouldn't do this deal. And because our minds tell us when we're excited, when we're emotionally involved in a deal, especially when we've been looking for a while, our mind's like, well, you know, it's okay.
Starting point is 00:57:46 That's not a big deal. But like, we should be looking up those things and asking other people to look at them as well, right? Whether it's a partner, somebody who has zero interest in the deal at all, ask them to look at your numbers or walk, walk, walk. over with them, they're going to find those things that your emotion tells them. And also just do the math. Like, if you do the math correctly, that can help you overcome a lot of emotion as well. Like, at the end of the day, the numbers don't lie if you do them right. So yeah, really good stuff, Paul. All right. Well, let's shift gears one last time and head over to the world famous. Famous for. Famous for. These are the same four questions we ask every guest every week. So I know
Starting point is 00:58:19 you've heard them before, Paul. But what is your current favorite real estate related book other than your own. My favorite, my current favorite, I have to, it's a little awkward title, so I have to read it. It's the complete guide to buying and selling apartment buildings by Steve Burgess. Fantastic. It's not a really well-known book, honestly, not as, you know, well-known as some, but it's a great book that just covers everything from small to large apartments. And they cover all the different strategies, how to get in, how to exit, how to get, you know, debt. And I just really love this book. The only thing I would critique about it is, Perhaps the time frames between flipping, you know, getting in and getting out of large apartments are a little bit compressed.
Starting point is 00:59:02 But other than that, it's a great book. All right. Yep. I agree. I love that book. Number two. How about your favorite business book? My favorite business book is not necessarily the most exciting book ever, but it's the one that's had the most impact on my life.
Starting point is 00:59:18 And it's called The One Thing. We've heard about it before by Gary Keller and Jay Papazon. I've struggled all my life, guys. I've been a serial entrepreneur. I've done probably a dozen things I didn't mention here today. And I have struggled with focus. My business partner that did the hotel and the multifamily in North Dakota with me recently ran for governor of Colorado. And he was in a position where he was rubbing shoulders with all these billionaires and Uber successful people. And he called me a few months ago and he said, you know, I've learned one thing. those guys didn't have any better education or any higher IQ than most of us, but they did one thing really well.
Starting point is 00:59:59 He said they decided in their early 20s typically what they wanted to do. They put their focus on that one thing and they said no to a thousand or perhaps 10,000 distractions along the way. And so the one thing, even though I read it a couple years ago and didn't implement it, this last year I've spent my life and my passion trying to, implement the principles from this book, also join their mentoring group, and it's just been fantastic. That's cool. Yeah, very, very good book, one of my favorites, definitely. A lot of people pick that book. That's a good choice. How about your hobbies? Ball, what do you like to do for fun? So I am very passionate about changing the world, and I've got this desire to funnel through relationships, through influence, through income. I've got a desire to funnel a billion
Starting point is 01:00:49 dollars into changing the world and the rest of my life. And I'm especially passionate about thwarting human trafficking and rescuing its victims. So as far as hobbies for me, I really am oriented towards serving nonprofits that I care about towards serving my local church and to also getting really involved with my family. I take fairly elaborate trips with my kids individually. So, for example, my son and I are going pretty shortly here to Northwest Ontario where we're going to have no cell phone coverage and we're going to go fishing on a remote fly-in lake in northwest and Ontario. We've done that three times before and we're really looking forward to that.
Starting point is 01:01:32 So I love spending time with my wife and my kids and doing those other things I'm passionate about. That's super cool. All right. Last question for me. Paul, what do you think sets apart successful real estate investors from those who give up, fail, or never get started? I think the difference is something we've already talked about,
Starting point is 01:01:52 and that is inability to tell the difference between gambling and investing. And I think specifically with that thought in swinging for the fences. Now, think about it. Here's two guys. Let's say we've got Gary and his son. And Gary and his son have quietly built up a portfolio of quads and duplexes and single family homes all around town over the last couple of decades. If they've never been in the headlines, they're not speaking at the national conventions and conferences, you know, for the amazing thing they did.
Starting point is 01:02:24 And then you've got this other guy and he bought a single family home. And while he was renovating and he realized that he could be commercially zoned and he sold it for four or five times what he paid. And now he's, you know, the talk of the blogs, talks and talk of the bars, etc. Which one do you think will be the one that's richest in the end? It's likely the first guy. And here's why. Wealth build up slowly over time is the key to success in a lot of ways because that second guy likely will think he's got it now and he'll swing for the fences again.
Starting point is 01:03:01 And, you know, I've got this saying that, you know, if you keep playing double or nothing with your investment capital, what are you going to do when you land on nothing? You'll have no more to double. And so it's really important to not swing for the fences. and for me, now, by the way, I believe there's all kinds of areas in your life where you should swing for the fences with relationships, with your time, with fighting human trafficking in my case, with my family. But I don't want to swing for the fences with all of my investment dollars. I'm looking to hit singles and doubles from here on out in the next 40 to 50 years. Super cool. That's awesome.
Starting point is 01:03:38 Well, all right. Tell us, Paul, where can people find out more about you? Well, I've got a podcast called How to Lose Money, and I'd love for people to tune into that. My company is called Wellings Capital.com, and you can go look us up at that website address, and that's the best place to get hold of us, wellingscapital.com, how to lose money. And I've got a book. It's on Amazon. It's called The Perfect Investment, and it's about multifamily investing. Thank you, Paul. This was fantastic. And, of course, people can check out the show notes at biggerpockets.com. This was fantastic and we'll see you around.
Starting point is 01:04:16 All right. Thanks, guys. It's been great. Thank you very much, Paul. And that was our interview with Mr. Paul Moore. That was cool. He's got quite the story, huh? You know, you don't get to talk to many people that have kind of gone through an evolution of different aspects of real estate investing.
Starting point is 01:04:32 He's really grown from where he started to where he went. Usually you hear someone talk about their little niche that they know and they don't, they haven't moved out of it yet. But he's someone that can kind of look back over the last 30, maybe 50, maybe. 40 years and say, these are all the things I did. And this is what I learned at every step. That is true. And if you saw my eyes suddenly just go to the right immediately, it's because I looked in my big table outside my window, has a big huge umbrella over it, just flipped over
Starting point is 01:04:56 and flew. So I'm going to go chase a large seven foot umbrella here in a moment. But anyway, back to the show. It was, yeah. Anyway, I love his also his intentness, intentiveness. I don't know what the word looking for there, about like not falling in love with the deal. Like that's such a powerful piece of advice that people need to remember. Like the deal has to make sense and math can make it do that.
Starting point is 01:05:19 So make sure you guys run your numbers. And again, we do a live webinar every week. In fact, David Green here is going to start helping out. Oh, there it goes. David Green is going to start helping out with the webinars as well. More often he's done a few with me because we just believe so strongly that if you can just figure out how to run the numbers on a flip or rental, a burr, whatever. If you can run the math, get really good at that,
Starting point is 01:05:41 you can do a lot of cool stuff in real estate. This is very much a numbers game. So every single week we help people do that. We help people learn how to run the numbers. So sign up for next week's class. It's at biggerpockets.com slash webinar. Again, biggerpockets.com slash webinar. And they are live events and thousands of people show up every week.
Starting point is 01:05:59 So be part of the club. So with that, it's all I got. Anything you want to add, DG? Well, I hope you catch your umbrella before we have the next webinar. So you're actually there. I will catch you that. As long as it doesn't flow like down the hill, that would actually be really bad. I live on the side of a hill.
Starting point is 01:06:15 If it just went up and over that fence, it'd be gone. That's a steep hill. I've seen that hill. Yeah. I own five acres of land out here on top of a hill and four and a half of it is like, you know, useless. Because it's like almost like death defined drop. But, you know, whatever. It's fun to explore.
Starting point is 01:06:30 I did drop my drone. I have a little drone and I flew it over there once that I had to go. I bought a machete just so I could get back there and go look for it. And I'm like scaling the hill with my machete. I felt like Indiana Jones. That would have been a sight to see. Yeah, it was pretty cool. That was pretty awesome.
Starting point is 01:06:45 All right. Well, thank you, Brandon. All right, thank you. Let's get out of here. This is David Green for Brandon. Squirrel Turner, signing up. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small.
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